The urgent need for a regional meetup grew stronger during discussions in WMCON 2017,[3] which was attended by Wikimedians from China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, Thailand, and Malaysia. We all share the common concern that those countries have never had any sustainable collaboration or any dialogue between each other, as exemplified by the lack of regional conferences in the area. We believe that sharing experiences between us would strengthen our communities and might lead to great partnerships in the future. However, considering volunteer capacity and available resources, it was decided that the first conference would be small but intimate, and sufficient for engaging participants in important conversations.

We decided to hold a regional conference spanning the area of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific (ESEAP) due to (a) geographical proximity, (b) stronger engagement of the Wikimedians from the main countries of these regions over the past few years (online and offline), and (c) the need to strengthen the community, as we have more than 2,000 languages in these regions, but fewer than 1% of them have their own Wikipedia, Wiktionary, or other Wikimedia projects.